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Grief and the AI split

blog.lmorchard.com

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Re: Grief and the AI split

#141

Post by ytoawwhra92 »

carlmr wrote: post #139
skydhash wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A year ago everyone was sure these things couldn’t write functional code Even ChatGPT could write code when it came out. > It was that they could very competently extract meaning from natural language, debug what you were saying from the terrible way you expressed it, and still formulate competent answers “Competent” is doing a lot of work here. If it were so, AI woul take change requests directly from the business…

>But instead, all you see are FOMO propaganda to get devs to adopt the tool with no asking if it actually helps the devs do their job. If (big if) LLMs/AI take over all of knowledge work the first thing you'll notice is that the first company getting to the point of automating all knowledge work will close off their models to the public, not advertise it, and take over every business on the planet. You wouldn't waste…

There's not going to be a single point at which that happens.

More likely what we will see (if this happens) is AI companies entering close partnerships with other businesses, building up their models ability to do that sort of work, then either acquiring their partner or directly competing with them.

Similar to how Apple monitors developers having success on their platform and then launches a first-party offering.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#142

Post by [deleted] »

lmorchard wrote: post #131
furyofantares wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's too bad it has so much grating LLM-voice. I don't think you typed all the LLM-isms, and they make it hard to know how much to trust that the rest is what you intended to convey.

I guess I have a grating LLM-voice, then, because I don't think it sounds particularly different than how I've written other posts.

[deleted]

Re: Grief and the AI split

#143

Post by daft_pink »

It kinda reminds me of the first time I visited a maker space years ago. It was full of cutting edge lasers cutters, 3-D printers, oscilloscopes. I’m doing the tour they told us we could make anything. Then the tour ended. I get to meet the real users and they showed me what they made. Most people just made random things like etching Pokémon into their pencil case. I left thinking wow these people could make anything and that’s what they made. All I’m saying is if you give the average person something that Lockheed Martin is using to build the SR 71. The average person would probably just use it to make a toy car and that SR 71 is not going to get built.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#144

Post by hofo »

There’s a similar divide in the woodworking community between people that use CNC and the like to mill and shape wood vs those that use hand and power tools.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#145

Post by furyofantares »

lmorchard wrote: post #131
furyofantares wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's too bad it has so much grating LLM-voice. I don't think you typed all the LLM-isms, and they make it hard to know how much to trust that the rest is what you intended to convey.

I guess I have a grating LLM-voice, then, because I don't think it sounds particularly different than how I've written other posts.

I've read through your comments on HN and you really don't. Comments and a blog post are different things but the difference in voice is stark. In your comments it's clear someone writing it cares about things.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#146

Post by sublinear »

sarchertech wrote: post #103
sublinear wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to be conflating code quality with product integrity. All those problems are caused by business decisions, not the developers. You do make a good point though that AI may enable more people to build their own when they can.

The term code quality is overloaded and not really worth discussing without defining exactly what we mean. But yes many of those problems were caused by business decisions. But engineers are perfectly cable of creating those problems on their own. If an engineer doesn’t realize that the function they called buffers messages in memory because someone made a wrapper function around sendAsync() and called it send(), tha…

I've heard this opinion a lot before, but in my experience there's a lot more dysfunction behind the scenes when stuff like that happens.

It's the same in other industries too. Someone designs and implements something properly and then it gets into the hands of product people who want to rip half of it out. The business then wants some much cheaper contractors to quickly make those changes without the original engineers involved. The result is a mess.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#147

Post by Ferret7446 »

ianm218 wrote: post #110
torben-friis wrote: post #12

Lots of mentions of the term mourning... As they say in my country, don't sell the skin until you kill the bear. All I'm seeing around me is people dropping best practices in a FOMO driven push for speed: let's stop reviews, let's drive 5 agents in parallel, let's not even look at the code! This is going to blow up. Only after we pick up the remains we'll find a more sustainable approach for AI usage. I suspect that…

> If we end up in a place where the craft truly is dead, then congratulations, your value probably just dropped to zero I think the craft is going to die and am not thrilled about it. I dont feel like there is a contradiction there

There's no contradiction, but if/when it happens, being "not thrilled" will overflow off the bottom of your list of concerns

Re: Grief and the AI split

#148

Post by Ferret7446 »

scuff3d wrote: post #91
torben-friis wrote: post #12

Lots of mentions of the term mourning... As they say in my country, don't sell the skin until you kill the bear. All I'm seeing around me is people dropping best practices in a FOMO driven push for speed: let's stop reviews, let's drive 5 agents in parallel, let's not even look at the code! This is going to blow up. Only after we pick up the remains we'll find a more sustainable approach for AI usage. I suspect that…

A couple of guys at work have been raving about Claude. How quick they get stuff done, how great the code is, how working any other way is a waste of time. I just had the misfortune today to wade into one of their codebases. It's 60k lines of code for something that should have been simple, and it's an absolute fucking mess. I'm gonna have to rip out most of it and start over just to get it to do what we actually nee…

Devil's advocate: perhaps you are holding a hammer complaining about rivets. If you used AI to interact with the code instead, you wouldn't have to wade through the mess and might have gotten what you needed fairly easily, except you're using the wrong tool for the job

Re: Grief and the AI split

#149

Post by rimunroe »

skeledrew wrote: post #125

> These are real feelings about real losses. I'm not here to argue otherwise. I'll argue it. Technically, there's no loss IMO, only gain. Craft lovers can still lovingly craft away, even if they have to do it on their own time instead of on their now-AI-dominated day job, just like in ye olde days. Nothing's stopping them. But now result chasers can get results faster in their chasing. Or get results at all. I'm a pr…

> Craft lovers can still lovingly craft away, even if they have to do it on their own time instead of on their now-AI-dominated day job, just like in ye olde days. Nothing's stopping them.

…except time, which sadly is limited. I’m sad about the real potential that I might not get to be paid to do something I enjoy so much anymore. I care about end products for sure, but that’s not why I’m in this career.

I do this because a large part of the work engages me in a pleasant way. I like TDDing in a tight loop. I like how it forces me to think one step at a time, how I get to stop myself from jumping ahead, and how I get to verify my thoughts or theories within seconds. I find efficiently manipulating text in my editor satisfying. I love the feeling of being validated that my architectural choice was right when a spec changes and the required code change is obvious, minimal, and clearly expressed. I enjoy the feeling of obtaining mastery for mastery’s sake rather than because it lets me create a product.

I’ve felt incredibly lucky for over a decade that my work gave me the opportunity to chase that. I may find enjoyment in wrangling AI, but I’m skeptical it’ll scratch that itch. If it doesn’t and I wanted to still scratch it, I’d have to do it on my own time. That would mean sacrificing time I’ve previously spent on other interests, and I don’t have a ton of time to begin with.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#150

Post by rimunroe »

lmorchard wrote: post #118
nlawalker wrote: post #89

>I think recognizing which kind of grief you're feeling is the actually useful thing here. If you're mourning the loss of the craft itself—the texture of writing code, the satisfaction of an elegant solution—that's real, and no amount of "just adapt" addresses it. You might need to find that satisfaction somewhere else, or accept that work is going to feel different. Frankly, we've been lucky there's been a livelihoo…

Well, yeah, that's what a lot of folks are sad about - they can't practice the craft concurrently with the livelihood quite as much. But if you don't have a livelihood, you probably don't have as much space for craft at all.

Exactly. I said this elsewhere in here, but I’ve felt extremely lucky that for the last 13 years I’ve gotten paid to do something that would otherwise have to be a hobby. The problem is that I have other hobbies already and am a parent with limited time to devote to such things in the first place. It’s valid to miss things you were extremely lucky to have in the first place.
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